AWS Streamlines Data Protection by Simplifying Snapshot Creation
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made it simpler to capture snapshots of multiple volumes residing on the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service.
Nancy Wang, general manager for AWS data protection and governance, said the goal is to make it easier for cybersecurity and IT teams to protect data residing on the EBS cloud service.
The Amazon EBS service enables IT teams to back up volumes at any time using EBS Snapshots that retain the data from all completed I/O operations to facilitate backup and recovery. AWS is now making it possible to create crash-consistent snapshots for a subset of EBS volumes. Previously, when IT teams needed to create multi-volume snapshots of EBS volumes attached to a single Amazon EC2 instance, they had to make multiple application programming interface (API) calls.
Now, IT teams can choose specific volumes they want to exclude using a single API call or via the Amazon EC2 console or the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager service. That capability reduces overall costs by reducing the number of snapshots that otherwise would have to be created, noted Wang.
In general, there’s a lot more focus on streamlining data recovery processes to enable organizations to recover faster from ransomware attacks. In addition to reducing the total cost of storage backup, organizations are revisiting recovery time objectives (RTOs) as part of an effort to reduce the amount of time a business might be disrupted because data can’t be accessed. Cybersecurity teams are now collaborating more closely with IT professionals to not only ensure those goals can be achieved but to ensure pristine copies of data are actually accessible. Historically, it’s not uncommon for copies of data to be corrupted for any number of reasons. The wrong time to discover that issue is, obviously, in the middle of a ransomware attack.
The overall data protection process is still mostly managed by IT operations teams but as cybersecurity teams become more involved, there’s a lot more attention being paid to, for example, testing recovery capabilities.
It’s not clear just how automated the data protection process will become, but APIs make it possible to automate functions that previously required a storage administrator to execute via some type of graphical tool. APIs, in effect, turn backup and recovery into a programmable service that can be automated via DevOps workflows. The challenge, of course, is finding the IT professionals that have the appropriate level of programming expertise required to automate backup and recovery.
The convergence of cybersecurity and data protection has been a long time coming and it may still be years before most organizations achieve it. However, now that more organizations equate IT downtime with lost revenues, the motivation for achieving that goal has never been higher.
In the meantime, it’s never been more apparent that data has gravity and that moving large amounts of it from one location to another takes time. The only difference now is that it should take a lot less time to copy and move that data whenever there is a disruption.
